Forrest for the Trees

Monday, February 19, 2018

Reading a play that is meant for the stage is always a dangerous proposition, especially when we're talking about plays that represent the Creme de la Creme of Surrealist and Dada theater. As with any collection, this is a mixed bag. I include some (though not all) of my notes herein as a crude guide to my thoughts as I read these works:

The shadow of Jarry looms large, it seem, in Modern French Theatre. The overview provided by Michael Benedikt is a great guidebook to the evolution from surrealism to dadaism to the modern avant garde. A valuable guide for those of us who aren't steeped in knowledge of these movements.

"King Ubu" is ridiculous in too many ways to count. I can see how this led to riots, given the dramatic realism that had evolved before its debut. And I can see how this clearly led to surrealism. Bawdy and entirely nonsensical. I loved it. I would love to see this played live, but I question how American audiences would take it, given the current administration. Sometimes truth is equivalent to, if not stranger than, fiction.

There were whiffs of Monty Python throughout this collection, starting with Cocteau's in "The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower". I would not be surprised to learn that the Python troupe was thoroughly familiar with these plays.

Radiguet's "The Pelicans" was . . . well, it was drop-dead boring. Meh!

I quite liked Tzara's "The Gas Heart". Highly experimental and, while it's not meant to be taken seriously (the playwright is explicit about this), the brain seeks meaning anyway, ridiculous as the search might be.

Okay, I get that the whole point of Automatic Writing is that it isn't to be edited. But Breton's play, "If You Please," needs editing. Except Act 4, which is beautifully edited.

Aragon's "The Mirror-wardrobe One Fine Evening" is definitely the most dramatic of these plays so far, as well as being one of the most poetic.

Daumal's "En Gggarrrde" = The Beatles' most psychedelic years condensed into a four page play.

Vitrac's "The Mysteries of Love" has pretty much zero redeeming qualities. It is not cutting-edge, it is not clever, there are no stretches of exquisite prose, not even any funny nuggets. There is nothing at all to recommend this play except that (SPOILER) a member of the cast shoots a member of the audience at the end. Frankly, that audience member might already be bored to death before the end anyway.

"Humulus the Mute" is just plain wicked. Hilariously funny, but so sardonic. This is dark humor at its best!

Robert Desnos' "La Place de l'étoile" is a sometimes funny, sometimes disquieting look at love. The writing reminded me mostly of Sterne in Tristram Shandy, which is meant as high praise in every way. This is one I really wouldn't mind seeing on the stage, a surreal feast.

All-in-all, worth the read, but probably more worth seeing on the stage. Break a leg. In fact, break all five of them.

Monday, February 5, 2018

Coming in at a mere 45 pages, you would think that Lanterns of the Old Night would be a quick, breezy read. And you would be completely, 100% wrong. Mind you, tedium is not an issue here. The stories (and I use the term very loosely) are compelling labyrinths that draw the reader/dreamer deeper in with each sentence. It is easy - and comfortable - to become lost in Diniz Miguel's maze(s).

The artifact itself is a monument, if you will, to the literature found therein. I mean this in the most literal of ways: The books physicality is stunning. The dust jacket, fully illustrated by Rainbath, is wordless; a piece of occult art that stands by itself. One could easily frame and display this cover on their wall. Under this, the book's cover is relief-stamped with feathering and an old stylized lantern, a fitting symbol for the collection. Canary-yellow end-pages then open to an esoteric-symbolic plate by of a seeker entering a pyramid, candle in hand, followed by a fold-out micro story entitled "Divine Buildings" (replete with a ghastly illustration on the back), which is, in turn, followed by another, larger-than-book-sized piece of Promethean art. Just these elements make this a volume worth owning and displaying (or, perhaps, locking away from prying eyes).

The multi-layered vignettes provide their own style of art. There are five pieces herein (not including the easter-egg story, "Divine Buildings"), but each of these five stories contain multiple stories, like a series of literary Russian dolls. Alcebiades Diniz Miguel's many voices are unique, but one can find therein echoes of Roman classical works, touches of the English ghost story, a hint of cosmic horror, and even some dry academic syntax. These various influences ebb and flow, eddying around each other, confusing the floor, walls, and ceiling of the labyrinth, further drawing one in.

One thing that Diniz Miguel does particularly well here is to turn the reader toward a certain viewpoint, say that of a poor prisoner in a dilapidated cell, then spin the reader around to see into the ethereal realms and beyond. Oftentimes, his narrators dream and are then forcefully pulled back to reality, as in "Lunar Empire":

Perhaps the moon was the most perfect black mirror that had ever existed. he imagined a photographic inversion of the night sky, soft white with gray spots in which an imperfect black circle or semi-circle hung in the midst of the pale landscape, milky and infinite. What might this black mirror of cosmic dimensions reflect? At that moment he realized that he had lost sight of the moon . . .

In the second vignette, a weaving path, in and out of reality, inevitably crawls toward death. Albertus Magnus swept up in a demonic vision while meditating on Cicero's mnemonic techniques, discovers that . . . he is not Albertus Magnus. "Some Dead Rats" slingshots between beauty and decay with a quickness that leaves the mind reeling. Enlightenment and dolor are never far away from each other in this nihilistic tale that teases with hope.

"The Ago of Ice and Gold and Mud" is a plotless meditation on ritual, oppression, cultural memory, and genocide. It is a contemplative piece, an intellectual riff on the collision between colonialism and the luminous, which results in a somber, gray realization of one's place as a receptacle of collective conscience. This one sticks in the brain for a time after reading it.

"The Devil, Almost" lends credence to the title of the book. Here, illusions cast using lantern projections prove a precursor to things, entities, which are anything but illusion. An occult excursion starts in the deception of audiences with visual sleight-of-hand, but ends in dark interstices that are far too real. Here, the light is the deceiver, cast upon the wall, creating ghostly shadows of truth.

The final piece contextualizes the whole of the book by mapping a metaphysical course, implied in the story structure, that causes one's best thinking to fall back into the labyrinth and become, again, engulfed in dark wonder:

Now, my vision could embrace, almost effortlessly, a considerable fraction of the universe, a stellar whirlwind that propelled the ancient material, withered and bright, along a course of black and icy viscosity. The inhalation of an abyss coordinated the swirling regions, holding galaxies in infernal gars whose function was to devour and exfoliate. The vastness of celestial gravity worked as the wheel of a mill and soon what had been an endless ensemble of celestial matter was reduced to dust decanted to its atomic level, uniform and frail ash, or the residue of crushed bones. This mill, however, is only the first cogwheel. The remaining atoms are recombined in a moving patter of cyclic formations which transcends mere repetition; no two formations are identical, neither are they entirely dissimilar. Planets, stars, galaxies, are each equipped with elements of various composition with which to establish their celestial dance that, once set in motion, might unfold over an immeasurable time in which millennia pass by like seconds. But even this space of time is not truly infinite. One day, the whole universe will again be old, decrepit, moribund. It will again go through the same destruction and disintegration process, resurfacing in an eternal cycle, replete with variations in tempo, tone, detail. There is no death, not even the hope of permanence or stasis. Because the universe needs eternally to repeat itself and the beauty of its unfoldment, a dead cosmos will never exist.

I received this book as a Goodreads Giveaway, for the record. I went into this book fairly blind, not having read the author's work before - and I pride myself on being in touch with what's happening in small press horror/dark fiction. Somehow, Hamantaschen had slipped under my radar. So I registered for and won With a Voice That Is Often Still Confused But Is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer, one of the more inventive and evocative titles for a book that I've seen. Hamantaschen's titles are, to some degree, works of art in and of themselves.

Not knowing what I was getting into, I found myself in a cloud of depression and gore. Now, I'm not too keen on depression and gore, though I've read and written my share of horror. I'm more bent on the weird and the eerie than I am on the outright horrific, so I had a little bit of apprehension about the stories contained herein. Depression reigns supreme here, outright nihilism. And there is more than a fair amount of gore here, which is just not my thing.

That said, I did find a lot to like here. It's kind of like visiting a museum that I'm not entirely enamored of, but finding the occasional painting or sculpture that trips my trigger. There are enough interesting details that I was never so put off by the stories that I wanted to give up reading the collection. There were a fair amount of grammar errors, but I edit professionally, so those are going to stick out to me. I'm not such a snob, though, that they got in the way of appreciating some of the fine thought and good workmanship that went into the book. Just annoyances, really. "A trifle," as Ligotti would say.

I liked, but didn't love "Vernichtungsschmerz". The central conceit - the chance to be rescued from an eternity of suffering - was well-conceived and laid out. In practice, though, this story of four childhood friends could have been written without the third friend and been better for it. The concept was stretched a bit too thin for me. A solid three star story.

"A Related Corollary" is a sharp, deep dive into the depressive mind. A good explication on what it feels like to be shrouded in depression and, specifically, how the logic of cynicism oppresses while simultaneously giving a sense of empowerment. More a philosophical exploration than a true "story", but I enjoy philosophical deep-dives. Four stars.

I quite liked "The Gulf of Responsibility". It had some issues - overly detailed descriptions and one sidelong character relationship that had absolutely no bearing on the story at all - but I really liked it. Conspiratorial, surreal, horrific, with an unexpected, but inevitable ending. The social issues here are handled with a bit of paranoia that is justified by the context of the story. Four stars.

"Big with the Past, Pregnant with the Future" is outstanding! This is the kind of subtle, understated story I love, one that doesn't explain too much; One that lets the unstated carry the story - the darkness in the background that is the abode of dread. Five stars, and I wish there were more like this in the collection. A testament to what good editing can do to keep a story from being overwrought.

"Soon Enough this will Essentially be a True Story" was good, not great. Frankly, I'm not a huge fan of gore horror. And, truth be told, I'm almost certain I know who the character "Karen" is modeled after (she is one of my Goodreads friends, but I have a few, and, no, I'm not telling you who I think it is - if you dig through the other reviews of this book, you'll know), so it seemed a little . . . indulgent? Three stars and now I fear for my life for giving it that rating. You'll know why after you read the story.

"I'm a Good Person, I Mean Well and I Deserve Better" is A) funny, B) trite and silly, C) poignant, or D) all of the above. The correct answer is D) all of the above. This story runs the gamut of emotions, a run that will leave most people uncomfortable. For this evocative, yet intentionally insipid story, four awkward stars.

"Cthulhu, Zombies, Ninjas and Robots!; or, a Special Snowflake in an Endless Scorching Universe," takes cynicism and elitism to a new level. If you've ever been to a convention where geeks hang out, or if you happen to be one of those geeks, you'll find some awfully familiar things here. But you'll also find one awful thing that you (hopefully) have never found at such a convention. A nice twist on what it means to be "Lovecraftian". Four stars.

"Oh Abel, Oh Absalom" is a satisfying story with a nod back to "The Gulf of Responsibility," a nice trick that Jon Padgett used to great effect in The Secret of Ventriloquism. Massive conspiracy, a bad guy stuck in a bad place, with more cosmic horror than the other stories, but not quite as pedantic as some seemed. Four stars.

So, if you, like me, sometimes look at what seems to be a rather ordinary painting, but can appreciate the deft use of chiaroscuro or the way a swatch of color flashes out just so at a certain angle, and if you tend toward the strange more than the awful, there is definitely something here for you. Maybe four stars worth, as there was for me. Keep peeking into those hidden corners to find that beautiful something . . . but don't stick your finger in there.

Friday, January 19, 2018

Reggie Oliver might be the greatest living writer of the weird and eerie story, at least the more subtle flavor of the subgenre. There is an auctorial control that I don't see in many other writers (much less myself). This infernal mixing of weird, eerie, and subtle results in a rarefied creepiness and sometimes outright frisson in the reader's mind. But most of Oliver's tales (that I've read so far) also have heart - a sense of quirkiness and even humor that make one feel the promise warmth in the distance, not enough to drive the chill away, far from it, but enough that the hope for warmth might make the frosty pain even more acute.

I had high expectations going into this. I bought two volumes of Oliver's work based largely on the strength of his collection The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler and Other Stories, and this was one of them. My expectations were absolutely met and, in the case of a couple of stories, exceeded. I am so glad that I have another book of Oliver's on hand to read beyond this one. I really can't get enough.

I was impressed right away by the titular story: What I thought was a mistaken switching between tenses is very intentional, and gives voice to the narrator's lack of education. The dissonance actually makes sense when one hears it over the longer haul. The humor herein is sly and wry: "Since I stopped working for the tabloids I've tried to avoid cliches like the plague". And this story of zoophagy is creepy beyond creepy. The layering of horrific themes in this story is stunning, with Oliver threading together at least three of them in the end. A dark literary hat-trick. Five stars, absolutely.

"Countess Otho," a ghost story or a story about madness (or, perhaps, both) completely subverted my ideas of how the story would end. This is a fairly complex short story, though so skillfully told that it doesn't get into its own way, like some stories do. It is not too clever for its own good, but it is clever. Very clever.

And in this tale we learn that sometimes, succumbing to madness is the best move. Or that hauntings don't necessarily have to be bad experiences. Five stars.

"Meeting with Mike" is an innocuous title for a devastatingly brutal story of brainwashing, conspiracy, and cult machinations. The portrayal of the Institute for Psychic Health (I.P.H.) is sinister and chill-inducing. The weird comes to take front-stage by the end of the story, but I won't spoil it. Suffice it to say that the ending is rather bizarre and very, very unsettling. Five stars for this excellent story.

Sometimes I love Reggie Oliver's sidelong humor, as in this line from "The Dancer in the Dark":

What first hinted to me that something very strange was going on? Is it only retrospect that makes me think it was the toupee?

"The Dancer in the Dark" isn't as weird as most of Oliver's stories, but the characters are well-fleshed-out and believable. This is a classic ghost story done to perfection. The catty characters devolve into rife immaturity like only a cast full of professional actors can. Oliver knows drama, both how to produce it and amongst his characters. You can tell he has acted professionally . . . or professionally acted! Another five star tale.

And then RIGHT back to the weird. "Mr. Pigsney" is as weird as they come. This story of gangsters, ming vases, garden slugs, and the afterlife is shot through with strong occult elements, which make it an engulfing story for the reader. The thought that maybe just plain old cessation-of-existence is preferable to living forever makes it intellectually satisfying, as well. Here, as in other stories in the collection, Oliver portrays something of a clash of classes, or at least a clash of social circles. He's done this in a few stories, and this dynamic always seems to add a certain tension that would otherwise be absent. Five stars for this tight, astounding tale.

"The Brighton Redemption" is high on the creepy factor. An imprisoned child murderer (both in terms of her victims and her own age at the time of the crime) practices bilocation, a miracle reserved for saints. But she is no saint! Four stars.

"You Have Nothing to Fear" - oh, Reggie Oliver, you clever dog. I see what you did there. Pun intended, eh? Still, a highly entertaining story only slightly cheapened by the pun. Still would have liked to have seen a little more depth of character. They are memorable, but uncharacteristically (pardon my own pun) unsubtle. Still very good, though. Four stars.

"The Philosophy of the Damned" portrays a more-or-less dying theater venue during the Russian revolution and the way in which it is, er, invigorated, by a new act in town. I really enjoyed this surreal story, which is thick on the weirdness, but not bombastic. A nicely balanced tale with a touch of horror, just a pinch, suit to taste. Five stars.

"The Mortlake Manuscript" is everything about Reggie Oliver's writing I love. An academic researches an obscure occultist, a scion, magically-speaking, of John Dee. Through this, he is led (wittingly and unwittingly, at the same time) to the so-called Mortlake Manuscript, wherein he learns the truths about life eternal and final death. This story is a masterpiece and is the best one in the volume. In fact, I think this is my favorite Reggie Oliver story period. That may change as I read future collections (and I will . . . I will), but for now this story gets the five most enthusiastic stars I've given in a long time. Hyperbole seems trite in this matter. You must read this story!

At first, I was prepared to award "The Look" four stars, as an excellent, but not outstanding tale of murder-mystery and revenge with a slight supernatural element, right up till near the very end. And I mean the very end. Then . . . that last sentence. That last sentence! O'Henry, the end!!! Five stars well-played yet again, Reggie Oliver, well-played!

It's funny: the ending of "The Giacometti Crucifixion," while trying to be clever, came up a little flat for me, unlike the ending of "The Look," which really worked for me. Still, the body of the story is tremendous, which makes the end a bit of a disappointment. Still a solid four-star story, though. I quite enjoyed it most of the way, most especially in the middle.

"A Piece of Elsewhere" is, by far, the creepiest story in this volume. And weird, to boot. You'll never look at comedians the same way. Humor and horror make strange bedfellows or, in this instance, they make bedfellows strange. Stranger than you want to know. This story strings a frisson of terror into what feels like a nightmare too long for such a short story. It packs a punch. Or, perhaps, Punch? Five sardonic laughing stars.

Almost every boy has or had an adult they feared, loathed, and hated. "Minos or Rhadamanthus" is their story. Not a story of cold vengeance, but of eternal fates and the scales of justice. A touch sad, but right as rain, as they say. A story that "fulfills the measure of its creation," to put it in biblical terms. An outstanding tale, well told. Five stars.

All told, I couldn't think of a better book to curl up with next to the fire on a winter's night. If you have any inclination to gothic romanticism at all, you need to read this book while enjoying a hot chocolate while it snows in the dark beyond your window. If I were holed up in a castle or a dark Victorian study and wanted to read the perfect book to match the mood, This. Would. Be. It!

Monday, January 1, 2018

Man is built to walk. Actually, man is built to jog, slowly, speaking from a physiological point of view. However you ambulate, our bones and muscles are constructed to move and keep moving. Sedentary life is no life at all (he says while sitting in a chair, typing up this review). I love to walk. If you have been reading my reviews or blog for long enough, you'll know that. This is part of the reason I was so worried when I blew my back out in late 2014 and was so relieved when my surgery in 2015 was largely successful. The thought of not being able to walk, for me, makes me almost stop breathing.

But Moor is not so concerned with the act of walking itself. He is concerned with what it is we walk on, paths and trails, and how they are formed and, sometimes, conceived and maintained. He starts with the first trails, "traces," really, to be technically correct (trails are, by definition, a place where more than one organism has trodden the same path or where one has traveled repeatedly), made by strange part-plant, part-animal organisms during the Ediacaran period, a time that I did not even know existed when I began the book. These bizarre, almost alien life forms (surely they would seem alien in the current geological age - the descriptions given to these creatures made me think that H.P. Lovecraft might have been revealing more in his fiction than we could have known before the discovery of these weird critters) left traces in mud that petrified some 500 million years ago. Their efforts were spastic, halting, and meandering, but they're the oldest traces we can find of self-propelled mobility.

From this beginning, you might think that this book then goes through subsequent eras of trail-building and use, finally reaching to the modern age.

You'd be wrong.

This book meanders. And it meanders wildly. Personally, I liked that aspect of it, but if you're looking for a concise history of trails from Point A to Point B, this is not that book. If you're looking for a more leisurely wandering through not only the history of trails, but across disciplines such as history, environmental science, technology, and anthropology, then Moor's On Trails is for you. Like any trail, it's not perfect, and the author acknowledges that (giving his personal E-mail address near the end in order to receive readers' feedback, which I think is awesome). Nor is it completely comprehensive. But like any good trail that you might walk, there is really too much to gather in over the course of one journey. I'll be revisiting this one from time to time and am curious to see how future revisions differ from this initial printing.

That stated, there were a few highlights that I found intriguing, sometimes compelling. Please excuse my meandering as I point them out, in no particular order:

Believe it or not, Moor is unafraid to dive into the depths of the philosophy of science. Though this is more of a side-trail of the work, rather than a full-on excursion, he points out some interesting thoughts, particularly those coming from a scientist acquaintance of his. Moor had asked him about the intentional falsification of data by some scientists, some of whom extend bold conjectures in order to claim scientific territory. Apparently it is not out of the ordinary for scientists to extrapolate, from their limited data, views that "reach" for the truth. Moor, in speaking with his friend, called this practice into question. The response is intriguing:

Karl Popper would have said that astrophysics and paleontology are not real science because you can't go out and sample it . . . I think absolutely the opposite. I think this is actually where science is. It's trying to guess what lies over the hill and map terra incognita. When people come in and colonize, that's just technology.

For behaviorists, chapter 2 is a must-read about individual agency vis-a-vis the group hive mind, feedback loops, and amplification mechanisms in the formation of trails. It is a great analysis of group and individual behavior!

Kudos must be given to Moor for not only collating so much theoretical information, but for living his research. For a short time, he worked as a shepherd with a Navajo couple (who spoke no English) for a number of weeks, learning about herding and trails (or, more properly, trying to keep his flock on the trails, mostly unsuccessfully). This section was cringe-inducing in its awkward hilarity. I felt sorry for Moor, who admits he didn't have a clue what he was doing. Luckily for him, none of his flock became casualties as a direct result of his ignorance - a miracle, given the mis-steps he made!

One thing that comes up again and again in this book is the fact that members of western society have a number of misconceptions about cultures and history. I was disabused of a few notions: the idea that America was truly "wild" when Europeans invaded (Native Americans actually carefully-groomed and managed their lands, particularly hunting lands within the forests of the Eastern seaboard, using strategic burning in particular to clear areas of underbrush and mosquitoes), the mistaken idea that Native American trails would, of course, take the path of least resistance (they did not - "A trail might go to great lengths to avoid enemy territory or detour to visit kinfolk; it might gravitate to sacred sites, or bend around haunted ones"), and the "fact" that modern hunting and fishing regulations were primarily an organic outgrowth of conservation efforts (actually, most of them come from medieval English laws meant to protect the local noble's hunting grounds from pesky peasants).

Even the very idea that "Wilderness" is something that pre-exists at all is a judgement error, or at least an error in perspective, according to Moor:

It may sound strange (even sacrilegious) to some, but in a very real way, wilderness is a human creation. We create it in the same sense that we create trails; we do not crate the soil or the plants, the geology or the topology (although we can, and do, shift these things). Instead, we delineate the place, by defining its boundaries, its meaning, and its use.

The author actually does an excellent job of presenting and validating this argument through numerous examples, many associated with the attempted expansion of the Appalachian Trail to the International Appalachian Trail (extending across Greenland to Scotland to Spain and even to Morocco). Far from being a "natural" phenomenon, trails are technology that define and delineate wilderness, rather than cutting "through" it.

Moor gets even further off the path of expected subject matter for this book when he delves into the ways that technology shapes the land around us and forces us to walk on trails that are dictated by the advance of technology. He does not pass a value judgement on this progression, necessarily:

In large part, the continued interest in hiking seems to stem from a desire to cut through the techscape to get to some natural substratum: to borrow MacKaye's phrase, to see the "primeval influence" beneath the "machine influence." But ironically, the act of hiking is also dependent on technology. Many of the earliest hikers relied on trains and automobiles to reach the mountains. Today, some forms of technology (like cell phones or ATVs) are considered obnoxious, while others (like water purifiers, camp stoves, and GPS locators) are excused. In either case, technology inexorably trickles into the wild, allowing hikers to reach new lands, travel in new ways, think in new terms, and optimize to new values.

This melding of technology and the wild is, well, natural. There is no natural barrier between "civilization" and "wilderness". This exclusivity is created in our own minds. Yes, there are some areas left more "natural" than others, but much of the separation is a mental construct. Moor relates the following about Eberhart, a legendary hiker that he spent some time walking with along highways and through "wilderness" areas:

The problem, [Eberhart] said, was that hikers tended to divide their lives into compartments: wilderness over here, civilization over there. "The walls that exist between each of these compartments are not there naturally," he said. "We create them. The guy that has to stand there and look at Mount Olympus to find peace and quiet and solitude and meaning - life has escaped him totally! Because it's down there in Seattle, too,on a damn downtown street. I've tried to break those walls down and de-compartmentalize my life so that I can find just as much peace and joy in that damned homebound rush-hour traffic that we were walking through yesterday."

The irony of me, a walker, sitting here at a computer typing up a review about a physical book I read (I do so prefer physical books as artifacts to e-books, though I've read both) because of my love for being out in "nature" is not lost on me. The irony of you, reading this entry about a book on walking, from the comfort of your home or library or Starbucks or wherever you are (I'm guessing you are not outside walking at the moment, but I could be wrong) shouldn't be lost on you, either!

Monday, December 25, 2017

I shattered my goal of reading 17 books in '17, but that's mostly because I did not read Proust's Swann's Way as I thought I would. I wanted to read one "large" or "monumental" work a year, and this year was going to be Proust's Opus. However, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus took the largest chunk of my reading attention throughout the year. I took from February 24th through November 14th to read it. The thought of reading both this and Proust was just too much. Not that I didn't enjoy Mann's book. I did, a great deal, but there are books that are a delightful sprint and those that are more of a contemplative ambulation, and Doctor Faustus was the latter. I'm glad I made that journey.

I must admit to having discovered my "groove". I enjoy a great variety of books, but there is a certain subset that I love: quiet tales of strangeness, sometimes venturing into the realms of horror, always deep in the fields of weirdness and awestruck wonder. I think I've actually bought more books than in any previous year and spent a great deal more money on many of them than in the past (getting a raise at work helped). In fact, I'm finding that I have rather expensive taste in books. Thankfully, I was paid well for some of my own writing and editing, and used some of those funds towards my expensive book addiction.

The first of the expensive books I bought and read this year was A Twist in the Eye, an handsome volume of excellent short stories by Charles Wilkinson published by the wonderful Egaeus Press. It was a great way to start the reading year!

Some books I got for free - at the library! Heaven's people, given the current political climate, I urge you to go use your public library and give them your support. I think I might join our local Friends of the Library in 2018. I did so years ago, in another state, and greatly enjoyed it. I think, with the kids mostly moved out of the house now, I might have time to do that again. I might not have read Atlas Obscura, I Contain Multitudes, or The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up (which really did lead me to make some changes for the better) if it weren't for my local library. Librarians ROCK! Give them your support!

As most of you know, when I'm not reading or writing, I'm usually filling my leisure time with tabletop roleplaying games. This year I went head first into the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game and bought and read, cover too cover, the Call of Cthulhu Keeper rulebook and the outstanding guide to gently borrowing and morphing ideas from Lovecraft, Stealing Cthulhu. And now, I am writing a Call of Cthulhu adventure. See how that happens? Read, write, repeat.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention my favorite read of the year, Jon Padgett's amazing short story collection The Secret of Ventriloquism. My thesaurus has run out of superlatives for this book. It is really something a step beyond your typical short story collection. I'll let my review speak for itself.

And you'll notice, of course, that star-heavy leaning of the books I've read this year. Lots of four and five-star reads. There's a reason for this: Last year, I vowed to cut my To Be Read list dramatically. I think at one point I had over 200 books on that list. I decided that rather than dreaming and about all the books I wasn't reading that I sort of wanted to and fretting about all the books that I think I ought to be reading, I was going to cut my list like a lumberjack on crystal meth. At first, I vowed to cut it to 100. This was difficult, but still left some books that were of some interest, but maybe not a burning interest, to me. I needed focus. So I cut it in half again.

This was a painful exercise. But, as I learned from The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I didn't need the emotional clutter that came with all these unfulfilled desires, nor did I need to feel obligated to read certain books because that is what is expected of someone with my level of education (Master's degree in African History, if you must know) who reads as much as I do and hobnobs with lots of people who are very well read.

After that cut, which, again, hurt . . . I felt much better. Then I started focusing on acquiring and reading the books that were left on my list. Whenever I wanted to add a book, I had to take a look at my list and think "Okay, which one of these great books do I want to CUT from my list to keep it under fifty"? This forced me to really assess the books on my list and really question why, exactly, I wanted to read such-and-such a book. I read reviews, both on Goodreads and elsewhere, I asked myself "is it really worth spending my hard-earned money on this book", I did some self-exploration to discover what it is I REALLY love to read. Yes, there were some misses, some books that I read that didn't scratch the itch I thought they would. And I'm certain there are a hundred, maybe hundreds, of other books that I would just love that I missed. But for now, I have a method of focus and discipline that is really upping my enjoyment of reading. I feel that I've really been able to hone my ability to assess my probable reaction to a book from the outside, before I've bought it. It's not perfect, but it seems to be working pretty well, given how much I've enjoyed the books I've read this year. And maybe it's just a psychological trick. Maybe I just think I like these books better.

But if it is just a trick, so what?!? I'm really enjoying myself!

The list is currently at 41 books. I think I'll read it down to 40 and go from there. I actually have 26 of the 41 on my shelf right now, and that's about a year's worth of books or more as it is (especially considering that Proust is still hiding in that pile, waiting to pounce). So here's to a fun, fantastic year of reading in 2018, both with my chosen few and, I am certain, a few surprises around the corner.

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Mark Valentine's name and fiction is often associated with authors such as Reggie Oliver, Quentin S. Crisp, John Howard, Stephen J. Clark, and Mark Samuels, largely because of these authors' associations with a handful of publishers known for producing extremely high-quality books, in limited editions, that focus on the borderline between the classic ghost story and the modern strange tale (e.g., Tartarus Press, Ex Occidente, Egaeus, Zagava, etc). These contemporary authors can be seen as the inheritors of a line of literary descent that includes such authors as M.R. James, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Robert Aickman, among others. And yet, to lump them all together does a disservice to the individual authors and to the unique approach of each author to writing stories of this ilk.

This is particularly true of Mark Valentine's work. Valentine's writing is not as "weird" as Oliver's or Crisp's, for example. Nor is it as horrific as Samuels' or Clark's work. It is more . . . "restrained," is probably the best word, though "stoic" might be used to describe his work, as well. There's a certain nobility to Valentine's work in subject matter, tone, and structure; a bit of the old "stiff upper lip", if you will. His characters (primary or secondary, depending on the story) are often aristocrats. The stories themselves, at times, are of a more formalist bent - not the straight academic track, mind you, but something more like an armchair philosopher or dabbler in history might find most attractive. Something you would expect to be written by a man wearing a smoking robe and using a cigarette holder routinely. This is not to say that Valentine's fiction is unapproachable. No, far from it. But there is a certain "air" about it that will sometimes make you wish you had worn your best clothes to read in.

This collection is a beautiful hardcover book put out by Ex Occidente, limited to 350 copies. The cover I have is a full wrap-around of a beautiful purple (literally) painting of a handsome figure, nude, staring at the painter with glowing, nay, glowering yellow eyes as it (he) rests his chin in his hand. Though the frontispiece in the book is done by John Coulthart (and is clearly, distinctively, one of his pieces of art), I don't know who did the actual cover painting. But it is beautiful and sinister and entirely appropriate to the mood of the book. So, on to the contents:

"The 1909 Proserpine Prize" is a wonder. A story about the judgement of a literary prize for dark literature in which one of the books itself has a say. Include mystic languages and auctorial subterfuge on a cold winter night locked away in a storied building and, well, you get the picture. But not until the very end! This is one of several books wherein Valentine shows, through his fiction, his love of book collecting. Five stars and this collection starts off with a bang!

"Carden in Capaea" is an ephemeral tale, or is it an ethereal tale of . . .? I forget. The words escape me. I felt that I had them, long ago, but their meanings have blanched from my memory, fading into . . . what I don't exactly recall. But whatever they were, they were beautiful, if indescribable. Five stars is all I know, was all I ever knew.

"White Pages" is a beautifully written ghost of a story that could, itself, have served as the beginning of a ghost story. The ending-as-beginning was intriguing, but could have been further built into something far more terrifying. Still, it provides its own sort of satisfaction by letting things play out in the reader's theater-of-the-imagination. Four stars.

"The Inner Sentinel" is a brooding story caught somewhere between the oast houses of Kent and a fantastical, dreamland weald. The sense of dread is palpable and the prospect of betrayal by infiltrators is unnerving. A moody story, not terrifying, yet disturbing in the same way that one might feel after waking from a nightmare and almost forgetting the specifics of the fright behind you. I loved this story for the way it caused my emotions to ebb and sway as I read it. Five stars.

"The Dawn at Tzern" is pretty, but unspectacular. It carries the mood of the stories before it, but does little to deepen it. It's not boring; neither is it particularly exciting. Three stars.

"The White Sea Company" is a ghost story without being a ghost story wherein the "ghosts" are spoken of, but never seen, their presence so thin as to be almost imperceptible. They are presented in a manner of storytelling that can only be called "ethereal". Thin MR James meets Dunsany, but with some unique, unexpected "twists" on the canonical oeuvre. Five stars you can barely see in the mists.

Well, the five star stories can't go on forever, can they? "Undergrowth" is erudite, but less than compelling. "Underwhelming" is, I think, the right word. Three stars.

Joyce's Ulysses, Richard Francis Burton, a masked ball, a bizarre octopus-god that might merely be a preserved carcass, yet-unwritten secret books, and rituals involving white-clad virgin boys invoking writing by candlelight. What's not to like about "The Seer of Trieste"? I loved this literary occult tale. Five stars!

Though I appreciate the dark mystical message and tone of "Their Dark and Starry Mirrors," I think this story suffers just a touch from a lack of engaging plot points. Normally, I don't mind this at all - I love atmosphere over plot - but in this instance, it just feels like a blank space in an otherwise excellent piece of prose. Four stars.

At first, I felt that the ending to "The Bookshop in Novy Svet" was abrupt; non-sequitur. But as I re-examine the plot lines, I see that it was inevitable. And when I recognize the titular reference to Prague, it is clearly evident: This strange story of actuarians, artists, booksellers, and poets ended right where it must. It is a story I will read again, several times, and savor, a masterpiece. This is the kind of story where any writer of strange fiction will say "I wish I had written this". Or at least this writer did. Five stars.

"The English Leopard: An Heraldic Dialogue" is intriguing in its subject matter and stylistically exploratory, but not compelling. I have to be honest here and only give three stars to this one. This is the one story where I felt that Valentine was waxing a bit too academic. I wanted to like this story more than I actually did, which is a shame.

"The Box of Idols" is more or less a mystery story, albeit a short, curt mystery story. Still, the story fills the measure of its creation and is a satisfying tale involving idols, the ancient Assyrian language, and the process of printing itself. It's a great dalliance for book lovers with a slightly dark bent. Four stars.

"The Axholme Toll" is a clever metafictional slight-of-hand about a mysterious series of islands and books associated with these islands. I enjoyed it, but I couldn't shrug the feeling that this is what an author does when he knows the story he really wants to tell but really doesn't know how to tell it. So I appreciate the careful artifice, but felt that there was too much left unexplored or left unexplored in the right manner. Still a four star story.

"The Seven Treasures of Bucharest" is a beautiful story to end this excellent collection. A spiritual, sort of Arthurian quest, but a quest carried out by the intellect, shrewdness, and diplomacy, rather than the sword. And rather than ranging across England, this quest is confined to a quarter of Bucharest. But the "adventure" here is no less than that of the Knights of the Round Table. The sense of mystical wonder that permeates this story is palpable. Five stars.

Up to this point, this is the most I've spent on one book. Ex Occidente titles are notoriously expensive, and this one is no exception. But was it worth it? Totally! The incredibly high quality of the book, from presentation to construction to contents, bumps this one well into the five star range. I think I have here yet another example of what I call my "chained books". I will lock this one up and take it out to savor from time to time, re-reading and smelling its pages, which reek of ancient magic, though produced not so very long ago.

Forrest Aguirre

Among other things, Forrest Aguirre writes fiction. Forrest's novel, Heraclix & Pomp, is available from Resurrection House. You can find more of his work at Smashwords and Amazon or connect with him on Twitter and Tumblr. His work has appeared in over 50 venues including Asimov's, Gargoyle, Apex Magazine, and American Letters & Commentary and in such anthologies as Polyphony and Paper Cities. Forrest is also an avid tabletop role-playing gamer, having been first introduced to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons back in 1978, when he was a wee lad. He lives, writes, and games in Madison, Wisconsin.